Complex projects such as the planning and production of large commercial or military aircraft require the scheduling and coordination of a plurality of resources. The resources to be coordinated may include materials, component parts, personnel, machinery and factory floor space, in addition to other resources. Integration and coordination is particularly important in complex projects since higher-order effects and interactions can adversely affect the cost of the project, the time required for completion of the project, and the risk of failure to deliver the required content. In addition, other variables of importance such as the overall effectiveness of the project need to be modeled and measured.
For large scale, complex product development, the coordination of resources is accomplished by modeling the steps in product development as tasks, with inputs associated to each task. The set of tasks, task attributes, and the input relationships constitutes a model for the development and production of a product of interest. The inputs to each task may be produced by earlier tasks, or may be produced outside the bounds of the model and considered as external inputs.
The set of tasks developed for the coordination of resources are profuse (10,000-100,000 tasks) and often inconsistent in their naming convention for tasks and associated data names. Tasks are associated with respective attributes. The profuse, inconsistent data and plurality of attributes, along with the requirement to maintain a well-ordered process present obstacles to the use of emergent patterns as templates to reduce the time and cost needed to develop project plans sufficient for effective scheduling and coordination of resources.
These emergent patterns of tasks and inputs may be referred to as “threaded lifecycle patterns” or “lifecycle threads” when considered in the lifecycle maturity phases of product development, such as a component part, assembly, subsystem or system. In order to detect these threaded lifecycle patterns in a network of tasks, it is necessary to associate together a subset of these tasks that are related in a network. Techniques exist for finding patterns in data, but these techniques suffer from a number of drawbacks when considered for establishment and use of threaded lifecycle patterns.
Therefore it would be desirable to have a system and method that takes into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as other possible issues.